The Early Career Network is an initiative to bring together students and recent graduates in the mass spectrometry field. The goals of this group include: encouraging
collaboration and mentorship, identifying community resources and opportunities that are beneficial to members, and creating opportunities to network with employers.
The Early Career Network is meant to include not only scientists who are at the start of their career, but also mentors and hiring managers who are willing to share their experience and
serve as a resource for the next-generation of scientists. There are no age limits or requirements to participate.
1e Interests: Proteomics, Protein Structure, LC-MS/MS Method Development, HRPF-MS
Niloofar Abolhasani Khaje is a PhD candidate in Pharmaceutical Sciences with an emphasis in Pharmacology from the University of Mississippi under Prof. Joshua Sharp’s supervision. She has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. She is passionate about developing new mass spectrometry-based methods for studying the structure-function relationships of biomolecules. She has developed novel methods for data collection of Hydroxyl Radical Protein Footprinting (HRPF) via Fast Photochemical Oxidation of Proteins (FPOP) that allow for more efficient collection and analysis of the resulting data. She accomplished this by developing an LC-MS/MS method that allows coelution of isomeric oxidized peptides, which don’t coelute under standard Reverse Phase (RP) LC-MS/MS methods, while separating different peptides. She also demonstrated that the coeluted isomeric peptides could be accurately quantitated using data-dependent acquisition methods instead of the time consuming data-independent methods that have to be used with RP methods. In collaboration with other members of the Sharp lab and labs across the country, Niloofar is developing methods to transform HRPF-FPOP MS into a structural technique. This requires adapting current methods in computational modeling to use HRPF-FPOP data to allow for structure determination of biomolecules that would be difficult using the standard X-ray crystallography, NMR, and cryo-EM methods.
Erika Dorado
Imperial College London
Ólöf Gerður Ísberg, M.Sc.
University of Iceland/Imperial Collage London
1e Interests: Mass spectrometry imaging
Metabolomics
Breast cancer
Hoda Safari Yazd
University of Florida, MSACL Early Career Network
1e Interests: Metabolomics, Lipidomics, Machine Learning
Hoda Safari Yazd is a Ph.D. candidate in analytical chemistry at the University of Florida and working under the supervision of Prof. Richard Yost and Dr. Timothy Garrett. She received her B.Sc. in chemistry from Sharif University of Technology in 2015 and her M.Sc. in computational chemistry from the same school in 2017. Hoda's research at UF primarily focuses on combining analytical chemistry tools and scientific programming for the metabolomic discovery of rare disorders. She is currently working on two projects; the first project concentrates on the detection of new biomarkers in meningiomas to improve early detection of this disease by employing machine learning as a tool on mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data. The second project is focused on the characterization of rare X-chromosome deletion disorders using metabolomics and lipidomics workflows by UHPLC-HRMS on neural progenitor cells. Hoda is one of the founding members and main organizers of the MSACL Early Career Network (MSACL-ECN).
Ethan Yang, PhD, BSc
Université de Montréal, MSACL Early Career Network
1e Interests: Method development of MALDI-TOF imaging mass spectrometry for clinical and discovery-based research applications
Ethan Yang is a PhD candidate in Prof. Pierre Chaurand’s lab at the University of Montreal. His research primarily focuses on elaborating new techniques to enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of MALDI-TOF imaging mass spectrometry for use in fundamental and clinical research to better elucidate lipid biomarkers on thin tissue sections. He obtained his B.Sc. at McGill University, majoring in Biochemistry. Since 2012, he has been an active member of the Let’s Talk Science site in Montreal, a national non-profit organization focused on promoting interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in youth. He is also a founding member and one of the main organizers of the MSACL Early Career Network (MSACL ECN).
